INSOLVENT REPUBLIC OF BLOGISTAN

Tuesday, August 01, 2017

I was thinking to myself, why I don't I listen to many podcasts? (Besides Due For A Win, but I'm an Atlantic City aficionado and there aren't many place anywhere to discuss a gambling town on the Jersey shore in a permanent state of decay and rebirth.) Am I too old--i.e., the same reason I don't watch Youtube videos for (say) movie reviews? (Who has time for that? And of course the young have time for that.) And then I decided--podcasts are basically narrowcasted AM talk radio, and I was never into AM talk radio.

Clearly this was the right thought to log into Blogger with for the first time in 2 and a half years.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Yessss remembered to update before the year ended! My lifestyle limits my ability to much of any old timey, typing-into-a-white-text-box active blogging (as opposed to passive Tumblr-style reblogging) but I do want to stick to a rigorous once a year posting schedule. What do I remember about 2014...

#CancelColbert was kind of dumb.

#Gamergate was pretty dumb, but possibly not worse than Hitler. (#godwingate)

I seem to remember a consistent theme in a lot of older Hong Kong films was that the cops and the gangsters were essentially competing armed gangs. American cops are increasingly becoming an armed gang, answerable to no one. Had a fantasy that all indictments that involved a police officer--you know, in a criminal way, where a cop assaults or kills someone--be handled by some sort of completely independent prosecutorial entity. Maybe a federal thing? Eh, but that creates its own problems.

Sunday, March 03, 2013

The Armadillo World Headquarters, the first real road trip I ever took
with the E Street Band. We got in a motor home and drove from New Jersey
to Austin, Texas. I remember we got out in the parking lot of the
Armadillo, and they were cleaning up from the night before. There was
nothing but Dixie Beer and paper cups on the floor. We played that
night, packed house, and I remember during a song, Bruce turned around
and kind of faced me. Then he turned back around, and as he turned
around, somebody tossed a cowboy hat from out in the middle of the
audience. They threw a cowboy hat, and the thing landed on the head of
his guitar. And he looked at it, looked at the audience, took the cowboy
hat, and put it on his head. It was just one of those moments. If you
had to do it in a movie, you'd have to try like 40 times to get it. So
there you have it, the Armadillo.

File under "things found when googling for The Professor Roy Bittan." (Also file under "browser tabs finally closed.")

Okay, look, the Onion tweet nor the outrage isn't that hard to understand. But I can explain quickly.

1) It's clear the intent was straight irony,
because it *should* be true that Quvenzhané Wallis is so clearly
adorable that saying otherwise is a joke, like saying, "Man, that Al
Gore needs to start caring about the enviroment." 2) Sadly, the author
clearly didn't realize that in our sexist and racist environment, the
adorableness of Quvenzhané Wallis is, in fact, controversial and a lot
of people actually do deride her. 3) The joke was made assuming one
context that wasn't true, and upon realizing this, it was retracted and
apologized for. End of story. This isn't hard to understand. We've all
said things we thought were clear irony only to find out otherwise. It
happens.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Wrestling was dropped from the Olympics because it didn't have friends in the right places. That's it. End of line, as the Master Control Program would say. And this: "FILA didn't think its sport was at risk, so it waged virtually no campaign to save itself." Wrestling--perhaps THE sport that harkens back to the ancient Olympic times, when the Greeks famously wrassled sans any clothing--should never, even have to justify itself to anyone, and definitely not to a pack of loathsome IOC aristocrats. What bullshit.

...you can also see this as the expression of the IOC's anti-Americanism, as we have the all-time medal count in wrestling and the last two sports cut--baseball and softball--were also American as spam musubi, but that's more of a reach, in my opinion.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

And if I do fail at my fake blogging resolution this year, you can always catch me on Tumblr. Microblogging! Which means, in 2013, a bloglike social stream with a network of people you don't know on Facebook (but wish you did.)